general

For eccentric creative types, twitter made a certain amount of sense six years ago as a place to exchange bon mots and kooky life observations, or even attempt a cyber-mediated equivalent of Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett, that is to say, some kind of imperfect, populist literature. Or crit, even. Once professional media types embraced twitter ("hey, this crazy thing the kids invented really helps us talk to our colleagues and filter current events!") it made less sense for bohemians to be on there, rubbing squishy shoulders with all that hard, ratiocinative careerism.

And now, it's pure stupidity to be putting time and energy into it since it's no longer a quaint startup that could sink or swim but an IPO'd juggernaut exploiting users for advertising "eyeballs." Now, those bon mots, kooky thoughts, and unvetted literary efforts pay for one undeserving executive to have a fabulous home on a craggy cliff overlooking San Francisco Bay, and another to tear down a historic house to put in a pricy, state of the art "green home." Not on the backs of our labors, rentier pigs.

And let's not leave out that, if one is the least bit political-minded (or even if you aren't), you are creating a repository of thoughts to be algorithmically combed and sifted for hints of subversion by agents more interested in you than in actual, hard-to-catch criminals. The idea that you are supposed to "check in" to "maintain a presence" feels like parole or home imprisonment.

Coming soon, part two: back to the e-zine underground.

About a year ago the PC Music label was covered, here, on this blahg. It's taken that much time for it to get the full-blown Pitchfork treatment.
It was blaringly obviously interesting on first listen but apparently the dancecrit neckbeards had to debate it.
Simon Reynolds, who is showing disturbing fogey-ish tendencies for such a young dude, made some sneering comments on his blog.

...whether you should even go deep with something so determinedly shallow as the PC Music aesthetic is debatable. But then these sort of operations are never content to just be blank, are they? They can't resist showing how thought-through and conceptual the whole thing is. Pointing out the references, the precursors, the intent.... Just like the art world.

Reynolds had done such a wonderful job explaining '90s dance music but since the mid-'00s he's been on a "there's nothing new under the sun" kick, with his semi-depressing book Retromania. If PC Music were actually something new/fresh/challenging he'd have to deny it because it blows his thesis out of the water. In any case, he can't hear the quality, and that's kind of sad.

My GIF Small Universe Model appears today on Tumblr for the online portion of the The Limited Collection exhibit, organized by La Scatola Gallery (based in London, Berlin, and the internet). See previous post about the show.
This is the anti-aliased Tumblr conversion remix -- the original is 1000 x 1000 pixels and much sharper, pixel-wise. Presumably that will go in the limited edition version but the gallery hasn't restricted the artists from posting on their own pages so I will put it up eventually.

Yesterday (Sept 16) Rhizome.org's ephemero-blog "Rhizome Today" quoted a post of mine (thanks!) but the link appears to have been broken; 'twas my documentation of a Double Happiness exhibit at VertexList gallery in 2008.

A laptop "eating" a slice of pizza, slightly visible in that post, was featured more prominently in a Rhizome post on the same show a couple of years after mine. Rhizome's photo became the "hero image" this week for a trendspotting article in The Hairpin about the so-called "snackwave" phenomenon.

Rhizome Today listed a few net art-pizza precedents and asked if it was missing any. Hey, this is important! OK, a "surf blog" that was running contemporaneously with Dubhap, called Loshadka, posted Thomas Galloway's Enter Tha Pizza Palace in 2007 (in case you get a malware warning here is the GIF by itself). I liked it so much I linked to it from Nasty Nets (note the trackback "right now" in comments -- that was from NN -- the NN post itself inexplicably disappeared).

Dump.fm has been all over crap food since 2010. See foot's ramen stunt driving GIF from the hall of fame. Pizza-specific posts include melipone's click for pizza screenshot (also above), illalli's Lindsay Lohan's pizza party, GucciSoFlosy's post-pizza, timb's pizza sirens, thekraken's pizza face IDGI guy, UAE's so pizza, and hundreds of others (there may be some tumblr overlap here).

Since Double Happiness touched this off, it should be noted that Jeff Sisson of that group rules the snack food beat -- in 2009 he and Bennett Williamson (also Dubhap) took a group of lucky individuals on a tour of C-Town, which included extensive consideration of junk food packaging, shelf placement, etc.

Part Three of Paddy Johnson's "Brief History of Animated GIF Art" on Artnet discusses GIF projects on Tumblr.

Tumblr probably had more to do with animated GIFs becoming a "thing" (beyond their initial geek/underground appeal) than any other single factor. The platform had a large enough constituency of "creatives" (not just artists, as Johnson points out) to achieve a critical mass of interactions, and from there this gospel spread to the wider world of casual meme sharers.

Johnson:

A Tumblr-based art world, generally speaking, is defined a little more broadly than the art world defines itself. The dashboard removes context the way a Google image search does, so that may have something do with its democratic nature. Articles and lists about artists on Tumblr typically include artists with little to no connection to the art world—mathematicians, animators, computer programmers, etc—as well as artists who work the gallery and museum circuit.

Let's also add advertising art directors, fashionistas, musicians, and anyone else who sought to punch up a page with animated GIFs. Having all these non-self-identified-gallery-circuit-workers in the stew (making legitimate contributions) renders the would-be art historian's job next to impossible for the GIF phenomenon. An article like Johnson's is valuable because she was there, witnessing these sites as they came and went, and while her focus is Art she's not so dogmatic as to exclude other elements of the mix. While I have very little use for David Szakaly's geometric confections and prefer the more subtle manipulations on Stephanie Davidson's Rising Tensions blog, you can't very well cover Tumblr without mentioning Szakaly. I can also mostly not give a damn about GIFs taking a ride on popular movie clips (a la Three Frames) but that's also a factor a critic has to mention. There is a tradition of artists unpacking media clips, and Tumblr abounds with amateur and professional versions of that impulse.

One possible correction to Johnson's history: I believe Tumblr initially had a 500KB size limit for GIFs, not 1MB. I recall people complaining early on about the arbitrariness of Tumblr's GIF handling (some worked, some didn't).